The Slams Hits DVD

Great news for all the Black cinema fans out there, The Warner Archive has just released the Gene Corman produced, 1973 gritty prison film starring Jim Brown to DVD. The film casts Brown as Curtis Hook, a tough petty criminal who, like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, is only nominally a hero because the people he associates with are so deplorable. Hook becomes part of a heist team that steals over $1 million from some mob thugs. The plan succeeds at first but goes awry when Hook correctly suspects his confederates intend to kill him. He gets the drop on them and absconds with the loot, which he hides in an abandoned amusement park but is later captured by police and sent to a prison.

The Slams was clearly made for audiences on 42nd Street and at drive-in theaters an efficiently-made thriller and its crude aspects only enhance one’s enjoyment of watching it.